Friday, February 18, 2005

How's Them Pet Goats

President Bush was criticized for spending seven minutes reading about
pet goats after the first plane hit the World Trade Center.
Michael Moore and Bill Maher pounced on this like raccoons in a
dumpster behind a McDonald's. The fact is, though, those
seven minutes did not and could not have made any difference.

On the other hand, if one gets repeated warnings of a catastrophe,
those warnings get progressively more strident and more specific, and
one has the means to do something about it, and does nothing, then
maybe it is fair to be critical.

Today, Middle Earth Journal -- a wonderfully-named blog, by the way -- has an update on climate change. NewScientist.com published an update on the same subject on 2/12/2005. They also published a piece called Meet the Skeptics,
which purportedly shows that most of the skeptics are not
scientists. Indeed, most are economists or pundits of various
stripes, funded by ExxonMobil.

The Middle Earth and NewScientist articles show how the evidence for
climate change due to greenhouse gasses is accumulating at a rapid
rate, while the contrary evidence is both minimal and
stagnant. Most of the contrary evidence is based upon the
uncertainty in the prediction of economic growth, since the production
of greenhouse gas is roughly proportional to economic
activity. A few days ago, I linked to an article in The Economist
that dealt with this. Other objections to the near-consensus
view of climate change are based upon objections to specific
methodologies, such as the the interpretation of tree ring measurements
as indicators of past temperatures. But the current
view of climate change is based upon a convergence of data from
multiple sources and multiple methodologies. therefore,
objecting to one or two of the methods is not a very effective
counterargument.

Is Mr. Bush ignoring all these warnings? Does he go to bed
every night and read about goats, rather than fretting about the
melting of the polar ice caps and the disruption of the Gulf
Stream?

In February, 2003, he announced an initiative to develop a method of
extracting energy from coal, while sequestering most or all carbon
emissions. This is called the FutureGen project.

"Today I am pleased to
announce that the United States will sponsor a $1 billion, 10-year
demonstration project to create the world's first coal-based,
zero-emissions electricity and hydrogen power plant..."
President George W. Bush
February 27, 2003

The program, as originally announced, would invest about $100 million
per year, for ten years, to develop a prototype power plant that could
make a big difference in the course of greenhouse gas
production. According to a 2005 House Budget Report,
the House is recommending an expenditure of $9 million for
2005. They recommend that $18 million that was appropriated
previously, but apparently not spent, and another $237 million that was
planned for, but not yet allocated, be deferred "for future FutureGen
requirements." They recommend a total federal commitment of
$264 million. This falls a bit short of the original $1
billion, and seems likely to put the project behind schedule.
In other words, two years have passed, and the project is barely
getting started. The House Budget report now says that they
have "the goal of developing virtually pollution-free power plants
withing the next 15 or 20 years". They've extended the
timeline from the original 10 years, to 15 to 20, and they haven't even
hit any technical snags yet.

I just hope that, once they get around to actually building something,
they put it far enough inland so it isn't submerged when the ice caps
melt.

With the seven-minute thing, we have a nice film clip, showing Bush
looking utterly bewildered. That made a nice visual statement
in Moore's last film, Fahrenheit 911. It enraged Bush's
minions to no end. But in fact, it does not mean
much. On the other hand, the delays regarding the FutureGen
project, in the face of mounting evidence of urgency, does
mean something. It means he doesn't learn from his
mistakes. Unfortunately, we do not have a film clip to
illustrate this character flaw.

One of the quotes on Middle Earth Journal is this, from Dr. Hermann Ott
of the Berlin office of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate,
Environment and Energy:

It's too late to stop
climate change, that's for sure, but we can still influence the degree
of changes and the degree of impacts. We can prepare for a softer
landing. Once the impact of climate change becomes visible, politics
will react quickly and forcefully.

I disagree. That may be the case in Germany, but it will not
happen in the US. We do not have politicians who are willing
to admit that they were mistaken. After all, humility is not
one of the Ten Commandments, so it must not be important.

The link below goes to a dummy account that automatically forwards email to the Federal Trade Commission's spam reporting service. Don't use it unless
you are a robot. Instead, act like a human and figure out the real address from this: joseph/dot/j7uy5/at-sign/gmail/dot/com

The Corpus Callosum is an occasional journal of armchair musings, by an Ann Arbor reality-based, slightly-left-of-center regular guy who reserves the right to be highly irregular at times.
Topics: social commentary, neuroscience, politics, science news.
Mission: to develop connections between hard science and social science, using linear thinking and intuition; and to explore the relative merits of spontaneity vs. strategy.